Excelsior, you meathead!

If the title of this post rings a bell, you know your Jean Shepherd.

Jean Shepherd has been described as many things. He is most famous for writing the source material for A Christmas Story, which he narrates. (He also has a cameo, waiting in line for Santa.) There's talk of a musical version of Christmas this year, but I can't say I hold out much hope. It might even be good, but will it be Shep?

We had an Impala convertible when I got my driver's license. It was the sixties, and Shepherd had a late-night radio show, on which he would just talk and talk and talk. One of the great indelible images in my mind combines the sense of driving with the top down on a summer's night and listening to Shepherd on the radio, all the time being the wonderful age of eighteen, graduated from high school but not yet starting college. If you could bottle that, I would buy your entire stock. So would a lot of other people.

I could listen to Shep all day. Or all night. And often did. He commented on things going on at the time, but he also told stories, primarily from two basic sources. The first was his childhood, with the Old Man and Flick and Schwartz and his little brother, all told from moments ranging to just before middle school to high school graduation. It was perfect and pure Americana. The second source was his army experiences, with Shep as the iconic GI, an Everyman in khaki, the kid he had been talking about on other nights grown up and serving his country.

His voice was neither rich nor poor, but it was him, and it was good for the radio. As I said, you can hear it narrating Christmas. Also there's plenty of Shep material online. I heard it so often that it was more familiar to me than almost any other. He wrote, as well as talked. And he broadcast live at the Limelight in Greenwich Village on Saturday nights. I went down and saw him a couple of times, among my first solo experiences in Manhattan. I mean, this guy was absolutely tied up with my coming of age. He was one of my heroes.

When I graduated college and started working, I was at Doubleday, which had published his books. He called them novels, but in reality they were stories of his childhood, loosely framed to appear as if they were a novel: In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories. Christmas is in there somewhere. (I keep urging kids to do OIs or DIs or HIs out of them, but no one ever takes me up on it.) On our list of books under contract was a title called T.S. Mac, which was going to be Shep's war stories. And eventually I was working with the editor who was, tada!, Shep's editor. This was the editor who had been waiting for years for Shep to deliver T.S. Mac.

It wasn't happening.

Other things were happening, though. There were dramatizations of Shep's work on PBS, including The Phantom of the Open Hearth and The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters (the latter with Matt Dillon). He had other irons in the fire, including later his own television series.

But still, no T.S. Mac. My editor boss was getting pretty antsy about this, because it was both late and potentially very commercial, so he set up a lunch with Shepherd (that's what editors did in those days, i.e., lunch) and invited me along. This was about ten years after my initial infatuation with Shepherd, but I still had a little stardust in my eyes. I got to meet, and talk with, one of my heroes. Wow. How often does that happen? T.S. Mac, however, didn't happen. (The title, by the way, stands for an army comment that could not be written out on the cover of a book.) Eventually A Fistful of Fig Newtons came out in its place, but it really wasn't that book. Alas, Shep's great army saga was never to happen.

One of the great surprises of my later life was the discovery of yet another Shep movie, directed by Bob Clark, as was The Christmas Story. It's one of the hidden gems that shockingly never got its due. It's variously called My Summer Story and It Runs in the Family. Yes, it's not as good as Christmas, but how many movies are that iconic? Still, if you're even marginally a Shep fan, it's worth watching. Here's a taste:



Shep died in 1999. You can still see him though, sort of. He did the updated voice of the father on Disney's A Carousel of Progress. Driving in my family's Impala on a warm summer night with the top down, yeah, there really was a great big beautiful tomorrow.